Tag Archives: acap

Axis’ platform for running applications on the camera itself is really great. For you who haven’t seen ACAP share I really suggest you click yourself over there to see what it’s all about.

As mentioned in other posts, Axis have created an embedded platform where you can install applications on the different devices to add features to the edge. This can be analytics that is looking for something unique like a people counter or advanced cross line-type detection. It can also be for simpler tasks like sending a message using a service platform similar to the pushbullet integration that I published here some time ago.

The only downside is that to develop these applications you have to know C which can be tough for the average script kiddie who just wants to perform something small. So, in order to solve some of the more simple scripting that you can be interested in doing. On ACAP Share there’s a PHP application that allows someone to write a PHP script that can be executed on a camera. This is a great application if you’re looking to use smaller APIs for your task.

PHP is extremely popular and allows you to do a number of great things. Python is another extremely popular language. Soo.. Enough said, below is the compiled ACAP and how to build it if you have the environment.

Recommended FW: 5.80+. The reason is that the package is pretty big and will need some space. We’ve seen problems with 5.60 and 5.70 firmware that doesn’t allow the package to go through due to it’s size. After 5.80 it seems fine though. (Yes, python is a big library)

It’s build to run on the MIPS architecture, meaning it will work on ARTPEC-4 and ARTPEC-5 devices but that’s it. Python version is 2.7.1 with some limitation built to it (see buildpython.sh)

When you upload the binary there’s an attached python script in that folder. Edit that and make sure you run a continuous loop on it to perform whatever you want to achieve.

ACAP is actually so powerful that you can create your own applications that are essentially script that runs off another application. To start a python script from the command line, use: